An upgrade tale

[bmortonaz]

I built a Pentium based MCE system a couple of years ago. In general it worked OK. I encountered a couple of nagging problems like the occasional "invalid file format" and needing to delete the recordings.xml file to fix mysterious corruption problems. Navigation in the MCE menus was also slow. So I figured it was time to reimage the system. And if I was going to do that, I might as well upgrade the hardware. I chose the Abit NF-M2 nview motherboard since it was AMD based and had integrated video and audio. The AMD 64 bit processor runs a lot cooler than the Intel Prescott I was previously using. And the stock AMD fan is a lot quieter than the Intel fan. I used 1GB of CORSAIR XMS2 memory. This was probably overkill for MCE. I also upgraded the drives from IDE to SATA. One drive has the OS and the other (1/2TB) holds the video. I kept the CoolerMaster ATC-620C case from the old system. It is now discontinued. I like it because it matches my audio hardware. It doesn't supported a full ATX motherboard, but it has room for a standard ATX power supply. I also decided to reuse the 300W power supply. This turned out to be a bad decision for two reasons. The power supply had a 20 pin connector instead of 24 on the new mother board. The ABIT documention warned about this possibly causing system instability and also suggested that the power supply should be larger than 300W. I decided to give it a try anyway and after putting the system together, all seemed well.

The first hint of a problem was occasional system errors in the MCE services ehrecvr and ehrev. I also encountered a variety of blue screens of death. The system would run fine for a couple of hours, then die. Sometimes, it would die shortly after a reboot. So after reading the forums, I upgraded all of the drivers (NVIDIA platform, NVIDIA graphics, Realtek audio, Hauppauge TV and other pieces of hardware). I still had problems. Most of the time it was ehrecvr crashing. So I decided to upgrade my TV card to the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1600. I read that it worked well under MCE and it freeed up a PCI slot (I had a separate HDTV tuner). There are only 2 full PCI slots on the mother board. I installed the TV card with the latest drivers and still had BSOD and system errors. So it was looking more like a hardware problem. Instead of blaming the mother board, memory or processor, I decided to replace the power supply based on ABITs documentation. I purchased a Seasonic S12-430W power supply. It had plenty of power for this system and had good reviews. I also liked it because it was quiet and had a protective mesh over the cables so they can't get cut on the case sheet metal. Magically, the BSOD and system errors disappeared. So that was the primary cause of my problems. The system started working as I had hoped. And it was snappy. Then I encountered a new problem. I found MCE hung with ehrecvr taking 99% of the CPU cycles. So I hit the forums and found the answer on this fine web site. It turns out that I had installed the NVIDIA IDE drivers which were causing problem with the service. I uninstalled the drivers and the system finally worked without failure. I'm not sure what the issue was.

Given all of this pain (which latested several weeks), I wanted to document it for others so that they can avoid some of the pit falls of an upgrade.

My system is composed of the following parts:
CoolerMaster ATC-620C case (black)
ABIT NF-M2 nview mother board (I liked the integrated audio and vidio. I use DVI for the video and SPDIF Toslink for audio.)
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Orleans 2.4GHz 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor
Seasonic S12-430W power supply
1GB CORSAIR XMS2 memory (2 - 512MB sticks)
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1600
Two Western Digital SATA drives (Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500GB Serial ATA for the video)
MCE 2005 XP SP2 and MCE rollup 2
NVIDIA PureVideo decoder

Thanks for the quality information I found on your site.

[xazos79]

Cheers for the post. Where abouts did you find the Abit NF-M2? I'm from Australia and looking to order it!

Cheers

[bmortonaz]

I got it from www.newegg.com. I live in the US, but really enjoyed my stay in Australia in 2003. Got to see some world cup Rugby and drink some excellent beers!

[xazos79]

Originally Posted by bmortonaz

I got it from www.newegg.com. I live in the US, but really enjoyed my stay in Australia in 2003. Got to see some world cup Rugby and drink some excellent beers!

I thought as much. Glad you enjoyed your stay! I was in the US in '97. Had an awesome time

[bmortonaz]

I had another issue to resolve. All of the hardware related issues have been taken care of. However, I was seeing a cluster of Media Center Scheduler messages in the event log. Media Center was unstable and did not reliable record TV. I was surprised because the system had worked correctly for one day. I always start by blaming myself when resolving PC issues and I decided that I must have corrupted the registry when I set EnableDebounce to off that morning. I have to do this because of my universal remote control. See http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archi...01/272766.aspx for details. What I didn't do, but should have done was to shutdown Media Center and stop all Media Center services before I updated the registry. To resolve the corrupted registry, I did the following:

Uninstalled KB925766
Uninstalled KB912024
Installed KB925766
Installed KB912024
I also ran MCERepair .2 for good measure.

Once again, all is well. I'm working on a disk imaging boot CD for obvious reasons.

Working with MCE is not for the faint of heart.